Andrew Neil's Hayek lecture

[DodgyAgent]

Well, it is getting a bit untidy, there are so many threads in this discussion (and even in Neil's address).

What I meant in 1 was that, although any kind of liberalism is better than totalitarianisn, the kind of Liberalism that tries to change things for the better, but in an undogmatic way, is better than laissez-faire economic liberalism.

Otherwise, I wasn't attacking the view that property ownership is a good thing bacuse people look after what they own better than what they don't own (and in any case it's their own business if they own it), but rather I criticised what Thatcher did to bring about such increased property ownership as we have.

People with the good luck to be in the right council houses just got handed huge slices of wealth that they hadn't earned. Other people had earned it, and whether or not governments/nations should own property, they did, the generations whose work had paid successive governments to invest in the country's stock of property, and it was just given away. To some. If you had a council house in the South, you could be well off now, from wealth that you didn't earn. If you had one in the North, don't expect to retire in Brighton on the proceeds. If you had none, maybe you shouldn't expect to retire at all (you have been set on the road to serfdom). And if you're coming of age now and looking for somewhere to live, you're faced with a problem, and don't look for a council house to live in meantime, because it'll cost you 12 years' pay.

As for Neil's frequent reference to the collapsing European economies (punctuated by Irwin Stelzer's favourite epithet, "sclerotic") contrasted with the vigorous British economic growth, I'll believe that when I can afford to come back to the UK to work. But I expect to come back to it to retire on the proceeds from my European income before that happens.

I think expat that you will find that Neil says that the UK economy is heading in the same direction as the rest of Europes. OK the distribution/sale of council houses may have been unfair, but being fair is not what this debate is about. If you want an equal and fair society then the most effective way to acieve it is by making sure no one has anything... in other words socialism